Cognitive Inclination And Rationality In Decision-making

This paper is about the cognitive reason why the bounded rationality proposed by Simon exits in decision-making, it is the Simon's idea that there is no "perfect rationality" in decision-making, because a individual not only gets bounded information in decision-making, but also has a bounded ability to deal with the information. And the "perfect rationality" decision-making requires not only enough information but also perfect ability to deal with the information in the decision-making process. Simon thought this disobeyed the decision-making in real environments, and he proposed the bounded rationality theory in the way that individuals have the bounded ability to deal with the information.On the bases of literature analysis, it is concluded in this paper that the reason why the bounded rationality exits in decision-making is due to not only the bounded ability to deal with information but also the departure of the process to deal with information, so it happens that real decision-making has the departure of the "perfect rationality". In order to understand the bounded rationality well enough in an individual decision-making process, this paper plays a key on the decision-making process to deal with information from the cognitive inclinations. This paper takes the point that the way to deal with the information in decision-making is influenced by the individual's cognitive inclinations, and the cognitive inclinations contains the predigestion of the cognition means, the consistency of the cognition elements and the conformity of the cognition. Individuals will have the bounded rational decision-making because of thesecognitive inclinations. And the predigestion of the cognition means is the one of individual's cognitive strategy, which can economize the time and the spirit action, but it is the cognitive shortcut that individuals may take mistakes on information in the decision-making, so the distortion of the information in decision-making occurs. The predigestion of the cognition means contains the representativeness bias, availability bias and reference efficiency, which make the biases or the departure of the information in decision-making occur, so the perfect rationality is bounded in decision-making. And the consistency of cognition elements is another one of the cognitive inclinations; individuals form the habits of the cognitive consistency of the information about things in the world, and the habits of the consistency between the cognition and the feelings about things in the world, which makes it very hard to deal with the information properly and objectively in real decision-making environments. And the conformity of the cognition can be used to interpret the conformity to the public in a certain degree, though this phenomenon can take the extra information to decision-maker, the integration of a decision-maker is broken, and this may bring useless or harmful information to decision-makers. So the degree of the rationality is bounded in decision-making. In a word, the degree of the rationality in real decision-making is not as the perfect rationality, which the classic decision-making theory proposed. So the reason why the bounded rationality exits in decision-making is due to not only the bounded ability to deal with information but also the departure of the process to deal with it...